don’t remember making my previous post. By the time I woke up that morning, I felt blissfully unaware. It was perhaps one of the best nights of sleep I’ve ever had. I got out of bed and went about my usual routine. My computer was open on my desk and when I went to close it, I saw my post. I know I wrote it, of course. But it’s as if I’m hearing someone tell me the embarrassing things I did during a drunken stupor. It’s believable but doesn’t really make sense. I don’t feel the same sense of urgency that I did when I made that post. It was as if there was something else I feared besides just losing my memory after waking up.
I did remember the raise though. But not quite how I depicted it previously. In my current state of mind, I stood in Robert’s office while he expressed condolences for working me too hard and it was him that offered to pay me double to get me to stay. I guess I will have to wait till my next paycheck to see if he was lying or not. A few of you were right about it being a good thing. If this raise is real, I could certainly use it.
I used that motivation to return to work. I was very careful to continue business as usual without talking with anyone any more than I usually did. I’m still the grunt worker in the kitchen. Just yesterday Lorraine demanded that I push the IL cart again and I did so without complaint. It has been a year and some change since the deal was made, and a little more than two weeks since I “received a raise”. I use quotations for the ambiguity of whether I actually got a raise and the two conflicting accounts of how I got it in the first place.
The usual residents were sitting in the courtyard smoking. I passed by them without a single hitch of breath. For all intents and purposes, it seems as if my asthma has completely disappeared. For giggles, I made my way back to the kitchen through the chapel. Nothing was amiss. No loitering spirits, no mysterious stains on the floor, no eyeless men. Part of me wished to sit in the pews to try to prod my missing memories, but we were right in the middle of service. Upon my reentrance to the kitchen, Lorraine clapped me on the shoulder with her bony hand and pushed me towards the prep counter beside the dessert station.
“They can handle the rest of the service,” She commented, although I could see the fear in Edith’s eyes as I was delegated to start refilling the sandwich platters. It was as if Edith lived to prove Lorraine wrong because not even five minutes later, Edith was caught halving the portions of lasagna to make it stretch through the rest of the service. Instead of a square of lasagna, residents were starting to get small rectangles that equated to maybe two bites. I watched Lorraine tear into Edith until she was suitably chastised. Safe to assume Edith would overcorrect and end up wasting pounds of food over the next few days.
“Shit like that makes me want to quit,” I spoke to Lorraine, rubbing egg salad onto a slice of bread when she returned to the prep counter. “Residents pay to be here and we can barely feed ‘em.”
Lorraine scoffed, nodding her head in agreement. “It’s a damn shame. But you won’t quit over it.”
“Wha-“ I sputtered indignantly. “I could quit.”
Looking over at me, her eyes trailed me up and down before shaking her head. “You’ve been here for two years now. You ain’t gonna throw all that away over a few plates of food. That’d be like me quitin’ over the shipment not coming in on time.”
“You’re comparing apples and oranges,” I grumbled, cutting each sandwich into triangles. But she was right. I had been here two years already and was promised an astonishing raise. There was no way I was leaving anytime soon.
“Both have seeds,” Lorraine commented slyly before stepping up to the serving line and giving Edith a scathing talking-to about also running out of mashed potatoes with only 10 residents left to serve. For those of you who don’t know, mashed potatoes make up 25% of the elderly diet in a nursing home. And whenever she could, Miss Lorraine would make them by hand. But in a pinch, we had an instant mix that she spiced up the old southern-mama way that made it so you couldn’t tell the difference. Two years was nothing compared to the literal decades Lorraine worked in this kitchen, though.
This brings me to the reason for this update post…A few of you mentioned previously that you think I had made a deal with the Devil. I’m not sure how willing I am to believe that. To be honest, if it weren’t for the stubborn residents haunting the joint, I wouldn’t mind assuming the events of that night to be completely in my imagination. One has to choose how much they’re willing to compromise their interpretation of the world before just accepting everything as fact. Besides, what would the Devil be doing in a run-down nursing home like River Down anyway? If I were the SOB I’d feel much better skulking around the fancier joint across the highway.
It’s not like I can ask my co-workers about this. We’ve just migrated passed the point where they would put dirty knives in the dishwater instead of in the knife basket. I can’t just walk up to them and ask “Hey have you ever seen an extremely disfigured man offering to make a deal with you?” Hell, we don’t even talk about the lingering spirits with each other. I remember the first time I came across one of the unwelcome guests too. It was way back when my mother still worked here.
Elbow-deep in dirty pans from breakfast, I was surprised to hear the sound of a ringing bell. It wasn’t a doorbell, mind you. But one of those rapid, hissing alarm bells. I was completely alone in the kitchen and I never heard it before, so I flinched and turned around quickly, splashing dirty water everywhere in the process. The scene I saw at the large door that led to the memory care dining room horrified me. I felt a scream on the back of my tongue but was somehow too frozen to move.
There sat what looked like a man in a wheelchair which wasn’t an uncommon sight for a nursing home, but the condition of the man was horrid. He was thin as a bone, skin hanging off of his skeleton like curtains. His hair was long but patchy and unkempt. White stands almost chest length obscuring his face. His body was twisted like a contortionist in the small wheelchair. His knees folded up unusually, looking like dried-out roots rather than legs. And for a moment I had the absurd thought of how he managed to get to the door if he couldn’t push himself and didn’t look able to use his twisted feet.
Cautiously, I wiped off my hands and shuffled over to the man. He looked even worse than I thought up close. His hands were thin as a bone, nails long and unkempt. He smelled like a mixture of piss and rubbing alcohol. It almost made me gag.
“Sir? Can I help you? Do you need me to get a nurse?” I asked trying to be nice. Part of me was worried I would get fired for being rude to him, but I had no idea why he was at the door.
“Cigarette.” He groaned in a tone more accurately described as a rattle. As if his lips barely moving formed the words while air just so happened to escape his lungs.
“Excuse me?” I asked, not because I didn’t hear or understand, but because I was taken aback by the blunt demand.
“Cigarette!” He said louder, this time notably angrier. His head didn’t lift from where it was resting on his shoulder. Merely, he looked up at me with dark eyes through his strands of hair. I was nervous at his volume in the same way a child would be at their parents when they were doing something they weren’t supposed to. Part of me held out home a nurse would shuffle by and take him back to his room, although I knew they wouldn’t. They weren’t supposed to leave the memory care halls.
“I’m sorry, sir. I don’t have any cigarettes.”
But then his head tilted back to rest against the rest of the wheelchair and he started screaming. The sound was haunting. No emotion is conveyed through the vibrations. I couldn’t tell if he was angry or sad. I almost thought he sounded in pain. In a rush, I fled back into the kitchen. No way could I stand back at the sinks with him just a few yards away. And getting the other staff was out of the question with all the cigarette smoke bound to be in the air. I was stuck. It’s cowardly, I admit, but I ended up hiding in the pantry until the screams petered off. When I stepped back into the dishwashing area, the man was gone. My heart was going crazy in my chest. With a wheeze, I returned to my dishes, hoping to remember to bring my inhaler the next day.
I mentioned the man to my mother when she and the rest of the staff came in from their smoke break only for her to wave me off. “Residents make their way from memory care all the time,” she told me. “Most want a cup of coffee and will wheel themselves back.”
It was only later when I started pushing the carts down the halls that I saw him again. He sat in his wheelchair rolling down the hall. His hands didn’t turn the wheels, nor did his leg unwind to start kicking himself. But his chair rolled on. I stopped to watch for a few minutes, wary of him seeing me. But between one blink and the next, he was gone. Unwilling to believe in the supernatural phenomena, I pulled the cart down the hall and went to ask a nurse if he made it back to his room alright.
The nurse gave me a strange look before jogging over to the recreation area that the residents sat in before mealtimes.
“We’re all accounted for and I haven’t seen anyone leave since the residents sat down…” She informed me. Before I asked any more questions, she started unloading trays and I took that as my cue to leave. But I digress.
Even if the deal I made wasn’t to the Devil himself. He does have power. I need to tread carefully.
I don’t know what I gave in return for my lack of asthma. If the modern media is to be believed, I gave my immortal soul.
I said, “I made a deal and now I can’t leave.” in my previous post. I assume that was because Mr. Deal-Maker might try to collect on my end of the bargain if I up and put in my two-week notice. There is a small possibility that my other co-workers have made similar deals. I think, at the very least, Wanda had a deal. I mentioned previously that Wanda had told me about her own health issues when she noticed my improved health. She confided she had issues with her heart on and off when she was younger. I also mentioned that she was now dead.
A few months ago now, Wanda was found in her home having died from a heart attack. Of course, she wasn’t that young and she had preexisting heart issues, but I’m working off the case that health issues = deal. Everyone else in the kitchen is an avid smoker and much older than I am, so there’s no telling what kind of health issues they might have. It wouldn’t be hard to find one to exploit, I feel. I really hope I’m not Lorraine’s age with suds up to my elbows and still working here. I might just wish for Mr. Deal-Maker to take my soul at that point.
But I will keep my ear to the ground regarding deals made and try to subtly prod my coworkers about what they know. If my immortal soul isn’t harvested, I’ll post an update when I can/if I find anything.
Until next time, I guess.